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Der alte König in seinem Exil ('The Old King in his Exile') is Arno Geiger's account of his father's years suffering from dementia (Alzheimer's).
August Geiger, born in 1926, started showing signs of mental decline in the mid-1990s, but the progression of the disease was relatively slow; at the conclusion of the book, some fifteen years later, he moves to a nursing home, after years of being cared for at home, but is still physically relatively fit.
(The life expectancy of Alzheimer's patients after the onset of symptoms is generally much shorter.)
August was part of a large family, and though he started his own relatively late (only marrying at age thirty-seven) he also had several children.
Almost his entire life was spent in the small town in the Austrian province of Voralberg, Wolfurt, but as his disease progresses even the familiar environment and family no longer offer a sufficient hold for him, as his loss of memory robs him of almost all foundations; the title of the book comes from Geiger's description: "Da irrt der Vater rat- und rastlos umher wie ein alter König in seinem
Exil" ("There the father wanders about, perplexed and restless like an old king in his exile").
While his marriage was an ill-conceived one, its end in divorce was one of the things that seemed to set him adrift; nevertheless, a supportive family, including his children and the estranged wife, at least offered a strong safety net in trying to support him in these difficult times.
Most of Der alte König in seinem Exil is an account of author Arno Geiger's interaction with his father over these years.
It is only very roughly chronological: Geiger is less concerned with describing the clinical details of the progression of the disease, than in presenting the larger picture of its effects both on the afflicted person and on those around him.
Geiger presents many of the exchanges he has with his unmoored father, fascinated by his father's careful, hedged, and often eloquent expression, the man uncertain of so much and yet still able to process a great deal, and expressing himself in often unexpected and creative ways.
His father's decline also leads Geiger to reflect on the man's life and the man he had been, as well as their father-son relationship, and he can see the disease as symptomatic of our times, in which we are so easily overwhelmed by the complexity and uncertainty of the world around us: "Von Alzheimer reden heißt, von der Krankheit des Jahrhunderts reden" ("To speak of Alzheimer's is to speak of the disease of our century"), he suggests.
For Geiger, writing about this is his way of dealing with the situation (some of his relatives react completely differently); he can also see much of this through his novelist-eyes -- and notes that eventually, "Der tägliche Umgang mit ihm glich jetzt immer öfter einem Leben in der Fiktion" ("increasingly frequently, everyday interaction with him came to resemble life in a work of fiction").
Der alte König in seinem Exil is as much a family-story -- focused on the figure of the father, from his healthy youth to his lost old age, as well as the son who writes this account -- as chronicle of a disease, and Geiger strikes the right tone throughout the narrative, largely avoiding pity (self- or otherwise) and managing to present a warm and ultimately understanding portrait of his father.
Despite the absurdity of the idea of any 'best', given the situation, Geiger does make (and take) the best of these difficult circumstances.